Popular passages

Page 251 - But the value of property results from the use to which it is put, and varies with the profitableness of that use, present and prospective, actual and anticipated. There is no pecuniary value outside of that which results from such use.

Page 159 - If the river is not put back and permanently maintained in its natural bed the progressive back cutting in the course of one or two years will extend upstream to Yuma, as before stated, and finally to the Laguna dam, now being built by the Government, thus wiping out millions of dollars of property belonging to the Government and to citizens.

Page 346 - Smooth diplomacy, the talent of leading men almost without their knowing that they are being led, skillful achievement by winning compromise were not his methods. His genius was the genius of a Bismarck, of a Roman...

Page 133 - Sea, and thirty thousand acres of cultivated land in the western part of the Valley became dry, barren, and uninhabitable. At the height of the flood, the Colorado discharged through the crevasse more than seventy-five thousand cubic feet of water per second, or six billion cubic feet every twentyfour hours, while the Salton Sea, into which this immense volume of water was poured, rose at the rate of seven inches per day over an area of four hundred square miles. The main line of the Southern Pacific...

Page 346 - He was unable either to cajole or dissemble. He was stiff-necked to a fault. It would have saved him much opposition, many enemies, many misunderstandings, if he had possessed the gift of suavity, of placing a veneer over his dominating traits, so as to make the fact of his rulership less overt and thereby less irksome.

Page 187 - If you think there is any danger of your visit to me causing trouble, or if you think there is nothing special I should be informed about, or no matter in which I could give aid, why, of course give up the visit for the time being...

Page 165 - I accordingly wrote an earnest appeal to the officials of the road [the Southern Pacific] asking them to act. They did act, and thereby saved from ruin many people in southern California, and saved to the Government the Laguna dam. ... I feel that it is an act of justice to act generously in this matter, for the railroad, by the prompt and effective work that it did, rendered a notable service to the threatened community. In no other way could this result have been accomplished. * Mr. Roosevelt's...

Page 172 - I may so call it — played its trumpcard by poisoning President Roosevelt's mind against Mr. Harriman, with whom he used to be on friendly terms, by gross misrepresentations, which caused him to see in Mr. Harriman the embodiment of everything that his own moral sense most abhorred and the archetype of a class whose exposure and destruction he looked upon as a solemn patriotic duty. With Mr. Roosevelt leading the attack, the " League " felt so certain of its ability to hurl Mr.

Page 173 - League felt so certain of their ability to hurl Mr. Harriman into outer darkness, defeat and disgrace, that they actually sent considerate warning to his close associates to draw away from him whilst there was yet time to do so, lest they be struck by fragments of the bomb which would soon explode under Mr. Harriman, and which was certain to hurl him to destruction. Mr. Harriman, of course, was fully aware of all this. He braced himself against the coming blow, but did nothing to avert it, let alone...